Elizabeth Gilbert recently wrote a column about how, after the enormous success with her international bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, she lost quite a few friends. She wanted to share some of her newfound wealth with friends who were struggling financially but, to here surprise, this somehow led to the breakdown of her relationships with the very friends she was endeavoring to help.

She wrote how she’d come to the conclusion that giving people large sums of money, no matter how well intended, can be a form of theft - the theft of her friends’ life lessons. Everybody has important life lessons to learn and to deny them the opportunity of the learning is equivalent to causing a child to skip a grade level at school when they are not ready for it.

There is as much wisdom in knowing when to do something as knowing what to do. Sometimes we can be so focussed on figuring out the right course of action to take that we give little or no thought to the appropriate timing.

An essential part of our education and socialization is learning to discern between actions - which are normally classified in binary terms like good/bad, right/wrong, smart/dumb, etc. A great deal of experience as well as social and emotional maturity is needed before we can understand the full consequences of any action. This necessitates much time, effort and attention.

Of equal importance, however, is learning the right timing. Rarely do our ‘life teachers’ coach us in this aspect of discernment. More often than not we learn it through harsh, and often painful, experience.

For instance, I have learned the hard way that what often starts out as kindness can quickly degenerate into condescension, and even unkindness, if we have no consideration for how our act of compassion is perceived by the recipient of our largess.

Similarly, whilst honesty is crucial at all times in loving relationships, candor is not. Without the restraint of appropriate timing a blunt statement, thought honest, can become unloving, even controlling, if we pay no heed to the other person’s capacity to bear our candor.

Wisdom is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon because it is context sensitive. Its dictates shift and morph according to circumstance, with few circumstances being exactly the same. Then, layered over all of this is the crucial role of intention. Thus there are no hard and fast rules, which makes good judgment a precious and hard won attribute.

Life has surely taught me that the right thing at the wrong time is no longer the right thing. Wisdom without love is mere knowledge or philosophy. Love without wisdom is not love at all.

Eileen McBride
Eileen McBride is the author of Love Equals Power 2, a spiritual seeker and teacher. This article was published on April 4, 2012.